Re-forming the institution: The wall as memory archive

This illustrated article seeks to recount the methods and processes developed within my practice-led Ph.D. research to address the absence of archival evidence of the lives of patients of a former asylum. I explore remaining signs of their presence within the times and spaces of the institution. I see these spaces as operating as conduits between memory, inhabitation of architecture and discursive networks and sites, especially those relating to regulatory systems and institutional constraints. I highlight the problems of mediating memories that I do not own and explore how the refusal to directly represent the experiences of others provides a critical opening in which the building's own memory traces are a starting point for the re-enactment, imitation or repetition of the institution's methods of spatial and temporal control. Central to this article is the fact that the research is opened up and revealed through my art practice, which includes photographic recordings and moving image projections.